Bitcoin Starts a New Year by Tumbling, First Time Since 2015 (bloomberg.com) 267
Bitcoin is already having a bad year. From a report: For the first time since 2015, the cryptocurrency began a new year by tumbling, extending its slide from a record $19,511 reached on Dec. 18. The virtual coin traded at $13,440 as of 3:55 p.m. in New York, down 6.1 percent from Friday, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That's also a fall from the $14,156 it hit Sunday, according to coinmarketcap.com, which tracks daily prices. Bitcoin got off to a much stronger start last year, and then kept that momentum going, eventually creating a global frenzy for cryptocurrencies. In a sign of its phenomenal price gain in 2017, it rose 3.6 percent on the first day of 2017 to $998, data from coinmarketcap.com show. It ended the year up more than 1,300 percent.
back to value (Score:5, Insightful)
returning to its pre-bubble value in a hurry
that was a good pump n' dump for 2017, big players can prep for more suckers taking the next joyride
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Most people saw this coming, there was money to be made but some people got this confused with investing in something that had utility.
It's little more than a decentralized store of value and that value is really based on the hype around it. It doesn't have the transaction speed/cost to replace mainstream currencies nor some of the features of other blockchain technologies, some more dubious than others.
The question often comes up "what do you do with it", well sure you could use it like diamonds, you could
Re:back to value (Score:4, Insightful)
"It's little more than a decentralized store of value and that value is really based on the hype around it"
There is little of the internet that has any value besides social value. Bitcoin - particularly the technology behind it - had utility as a way to store and transfer value securely and quickly across the world. It's still cheaper other cryptocurrencies to send 'money' to the other side of the world than it is to use a bank or Western Union. Not to mention that the increased competition has forced Western Union and moneygram to lower their fees, which are now half of what they were just a couple years ago.
Now btc's first mover advantage has placed it as the 'gold standard' of which an entire ecosystem of digital currencies valued at $600 Billion (of which BTC itself is less than half that) are traded against.
Remember that the USD is backed by the 'faith and credit' of the government, as every other world currency is backed by the faith and credit that their respective goverments won't fuck up their economy so much that their currency becomes worthless.
Bitcoin sidesteps all of that 'faith' by having a limited supply, decentralized management and markets, and the inability for any one organization or actor to fuck it all up (China tried, and failed) That has very clear utility for financial markets and economic systems.
Re:back to value (Score:4, Informative)
Bitcoin - particularly the technology behind it - had utility as a way to store and transfer value securely and quickly across the world. It's still cheaper other cryptocurrencies to send 'money' to the other side of the world than it is to use a bank or Western Union.
Well no, it is not. The cost involved in making a transaction is skyrocketing, the rate at which transactions can be processed is very low and even now there exist many tens of thousands of transactions that are unconfirmed by the network with them even getting dropped after a couple of weeks. And even in the case you describe it is still just an intermediate store of value, you're going to convert your local currency to bitcoin, transfer it to another location and then convert back to the new local currency so you can actually use it for something because bitcoin itself is not useful.
But that is an aside to the fact that bitcoin has no use outside of being a store of value, other stores of value (gold, diamonds, land, etc for example) have many uses which is why they have value. Their value changes based in part on speculation but also as supply and demand for the real uses of those commodities fluctuates. Bitcoin's value changes purely on speculation because it has no actual usefulness. Other blockchain technologies that focus on being currency replacements or decentralized contract verification actually have usefulness as a technology where bitcoin does not and being a 'first mover' does not give it usefulness, it gives speculative value which is why we see the wild fluctuations.
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(gold, diamonds, land, etc for example) have many uses which is why they have value.
Their many uses is why they have *some* value. They are traded well above that, though. Industrial diamonds are a lot cheaper than jewelry diamonds. Cheap gold mines can produce gold at $400/oz, but people are willing to pay $1200 for it and put it in a vault. Why is that ? The only time that happens is when there's a supply shortage, but we're mining 10 times the amount of gold that is needed for industry, so there's no shortage. And we already have a 50 year stockpile of the stuff.
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Diamonds might not be a good example, but gold's value as a store of vale has more to do with its history as an item with value. The use for jewelry is also significant, especially in some cultures.
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Gold is desirable in jewelry mostly because of its value. It's an investment you can wear (and show off). In the early days of aluminum it was also used in jewelry, until someone figured out how to make it cheaply, and then people lost interest.
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Re: back to value (Score:4, Insightful)
No Bitcoin is a failure, with a bottlenecked architecture that prevents liquidity, high transaction fees far in excess of bank wiring fee, high percentage of use for black market begging for government intervention, and extreme volatility making it useless as store of value
How do you define failure? (Score:4, Informative)
No Bitcoin is a failure, with a bottlenecked architecture that prevents liquidity, high transaction fees far in excess of bank wiring fee, high percentage of use for black market begging for government intervention, and extreme volatility making it useless as store of value
Your claim reads "Bitcoin is a failure", but your explanation is roughly "Bitcoin has problems".
Bitcoin is in widespread use, people are looking into fixing the problems, and... what's your definition of a failure?
Is Twitter a failure in your book?
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False, not in widespread use at all, compared to say dollars or euros, too illiquid. waiting days for a transaction cripples it.
Bringing up Twitter, you are funny. Yes Twitter is losing money, not making it. Failure as a business.
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Your claim reads "Bitcoin is a failure", but your explanation is roughly "Bitcoin has problems".
But you're not willing, or, more likely, not capable, of offering any explanation about the problems.
You know what's that called? Bullshit. And you are full of it.
Idk, maybe that's going a bit far. 15 million people use bitcoin. I bet less than 6.5 million use the Sierra Leonean Leone. I can see it's easy to call anything a failure. The US dollar doesn't even represent gold any more. Therefore I curse you.
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You are extolling the creation of fabricated financial instruments, that outstrip the available supply (according to you) of a completely made up thing on the Internet with amazing volatility (according to TFA), and backed by nothing by blind faith, from fly-by-night institutions that mostly didn't exist 5 years ago, some of which already do not exist today due to borderline (if not outright) criminal behavior [wikipedia.org].
I see no problems with this whatsoever. Next up: Jesus futures. Buy today and get in on the grou
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Gee, it's almost like there are exactly zero countries that tie their currency to gold anymore.
Your point?
Re:back to value (Score:4, Informative)
Unless, of course, you want to transfer some of that value into your pocket so you can buy a loaf of bread and a pound of ground beef. Then, it's not so quick, or so secure, judging from the backlog of transactions.
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Bitcoin - particularly the technology behind it - had utility as a way to store and transfer value securely and quickly across the world. It's still cheaper other cryptocurrencies to send 'money' to the other side of the world than it is to use a bank or Western Union.
What? Western Union, maybe (I'm clueless about what their actual fees are so can't speak there), but sending by bank is pretty damn cheap. But more importantly, if Bitcoin is not being used as a currency, then using bitcoin for any sort of uses like this is still terrible. Because now not only do you still have the bank involved taking their cut, but you also have to pay the exchanges their cut, then pay the miners their transaction fees, then at the other end they pay another exchange to transfer back into
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What? Western Union, maybe (I'm clueless about what their actual fees are so can't speak there), but sending by bank is pretty damn cheap.
Not cheap at all if there is a currency change. Also, Western Union, and the American banking system in general, are restricted from doing business in many areas of the world.
My company employs a graphic artist that lives in Karachi, Pakistan. Bitcoin is by far the easiest and cheapest way to pay her.
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The US banking system does seem to be pretty screwed up. There are simpler ways to fix that than bitcoin.
And with bitcoin you probably have to deal with TWO currency changes, not one, plus any bitcoin fees. Those online exchanges aren't it it for charity.
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Well damn! Your company needs to learn about this small organization I use. It's called the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, better known as HSBC. Having an account open in Hong Kong, you can wire money anywhere in the world, with delivery within 1 business day, and the cost is only HKD$100 (about $14.50 US). Any amount, fixed price. In any currency, in and out.
For example, some of my clients pay in RMB, some in USD, some in EUR, some SGD, and so on. I can forex the funds for free, into one
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[Citation Needed]
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It's only cheap if you stay within boundaries. Sending money from Europe to the US is ridiculously expensive. Even sending money from the EU to the UK is stupid expensive because the currency conversion costs a ridiculous amount of money. With most crypto, the fees are much, much smaller. Granted, BTC fees are getting silly. But I can buy litecoin or ethereum with euros, send it to the US for a very small fee, and the receiving party can convert it to USD for a very small fee.
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and the inability for any one organization or actor to fuck it all up (China tried, and failed) That has very clear utility for financial markets and economic systems.
The Internet was designed by DARPA to be decentralized in order to make it impervious to attack. I just read a headline that the Congo has "shut down all Internet access" whatever that means. Our corporate overlords in the US largely dictate what we can and can't do with it now. Feature creep over a couple decades.
We shall see how long it take
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How right you are. Now, excuse me, I have to use PayPal to finish sending money to an artist whose work I want to encourage but doesn't accept Patreon, then I'm going to Amazon to get shipped to me some things I want and go to Kickstarter to get some things maybe shipped to me a I really want. Hopefully my Lyft gets here after I finish the food I ordered from [too many competing sites ordering food delivery].
Yup, glad there is nothing
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Just last week, we tossed another $1.5 trillion of debt onto the pile with the new tax cut. How much "faith and credit" do you have in Donald Trump?
Huh, I go to the Federal Government [treasurydirect.gov] and I see our debt has increased by about $360 million since the passage of the tax reform bill. Nope, not $1.5 trillion! That debt doesn't exist yet, does it?
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It is backed by the US economy.
Inflation goes up when the economy is booming. During the Great Depression, deflation was a serious problem, and the value of the dollar soared.
The strength of the economy and the value of the dollar are negatively correlated.
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Don't forget that the supply isn't really that limited if everything is paid for in fractional bitcoin, and there's no effective limit to how small the fractions get. At least with regular government currencies, the denominations are limited to whatever the government creates, e.g. the penny, nickel, dime, quarter, $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, and $100.
Hey look guys, I just came up with my own crypto-currency that uses blockchain and many other buzzwords called CryptoBlock! It has a limited supply of 10 blocks,
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At least with diamonds you can shine them up and put them in rings and stuff. Can't even do that with bitcoin.
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This is more an experiment in Blockchain concepts than a joyride. Economists will be digging through this carnage for a century; at least it will give them something concrete to do for once.
Some of us have identified a critical weakness in anything involving Blockchains, not just involving speculation/gambling. Let's just call it for now "Timer Trust". What means do we have to determine that any "mining", or for that matter any transaction or transfer, actually happened when the Blockchain thinks it did? Ho
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Femtosecond synchronization between remote clocks is even possible, the scale where gradient of gravitational potential becomes significant to frequency difference between two clocks according to General Relativity, to the tune of 10E-16 variation in frequency per effective meter of elevation. There is discussion of defining a "chronometric geoid", a mathematical surface around the earth upon which atomic clocks can run at the same rate.
What do you define as "Pre Bubble"??? (Score:2)
The value is still thousands higher than it was at the first of December 2017, and doesn't seem to be diminishing further. I find it hard to call what just happened a "bubble", which would imply a drop of something more like 80-90%, not 20-30%...
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Why anyone would put money into this Ponzi scheme is beyond me.
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"back to preibubble"? nope, it's still up more than 1,000% over one year.
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I laughed. I warned him that I was not a reliable source for investment advice, and that while I thought Bitcoin prices were going to continue to rise, I had no way to predict when it would crash. Except, that I thought it would be pretty soon (this was at ~$17-18k/bc).
And then I laughed, again, and tried to remember if I had any old Bitcoin wallets in my old files.
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There's actually no tumble at all, the story is BS. It's bounced between 13000 and 14000 several times in the last four days.
That's still a tumble from when it topped 19,000. (Granted, it's still a lot higher than it was a few months ago- so most people who own some are still ahead). It sounds likely that bitcoin is finding it's price. And for now, that price is in the 13,000-14,000 range. With banks and futures, and big financial vehicles coming in to place, bitcoin is going to be more stable. Less fluctuation, but also less growth. This time next year it will probably be unusual for bitcoin to fluctuate more than 10% in a
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[R]eturning to its pre-bubble value in a hurry....
Not even close. When the value of Bitcoin is around $3.00, then it will return back to its pre-bubble (and actual, defensible) value. Every single penny of "value" above that is just hot air.
Re:Correction: Just a correction (Score:5, Interesting)
Bitcoin is only going to go up because there are only so many coins to go around...
The price bubble in Bitcoin has brought forth a plethora of other cryptocurrencies, most of them with the same algorithmically limited money supply as Bitcoin. Even putting aside such minutiae as having to figure out what in hell "tethers" are, with each new currency and with each new fork of every existing cryptocurrency, there is an additional new store of possible units that can be created. Instead of a limited money, we are approaching digital Zimbabwe.
Re:Correction: Just a correction (Score:5, Informative)
No, just because the supply of something is limited does not mean its value will increase.
I know people who still cling on to their Beanie Babies, believing they one day will recover their losses and come out ahead.
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Beanie Babies are a mass produced item made from cheap materials. There's no reason for the value to be substantially detached from manufacturing cost.
Bitcoin is not mass produced.
Why you'd think that the two have anything in common is puzzling.
Re:Correction: Just a correction (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe because both of their values during their respective hype bubbles far outstripped their real value?
At least with the beanie baby, you have a tangible, physical thing that you could potentially burn to release energy, level a shaky piece of furniture, or use to wedge open a door - so it still has some marginal residual value. You can't ever recover the energy spent to "mine" bitcoin, it doesn't physically exist anywhere except as a pattern of electrons in a computer, and it only has any value because of the delusion of the masses.
If energy cost was factored into bitcoin, it would probably have negative value.
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Maybe because both of their values during their respective hype bubbles far outstripped their real value?
How do you determine the real value ? And, using your method, what's the real value of gold ?
it doesn't physically exist anywhere except as a pattern of electrons in a computer, and it only has any value because of the delusion of the masses.
Your "real" money in your bank account doesn't physically exist either. These are also just patterns on a computer.
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So all we need to do is wait for the global banking system to fail, and count on no action being taken by anyone to prevent it, as well as all governments to sit on their hands and do absolutely nothing while billions of people are plunged into poverty.
That should happen Real Soon Now(tm)...
But hey, at least you'll have some outrageously valued bits on your SSD that you won't be able to access because the electricity is shut off due to the global economic collapse! That should keep you warm and your belly
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Bitcoins price will be 25000 by feb 1 , or i'll eat my dick... J.M
Shall I pass the mustard?
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Oh my god, you're sick. Clearly this calls for ketchup.
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But is it a sandwich??
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Building on your hilarious analog:
You forgot that there are other 5-year-olds that are "forking" your drawings, which creates an essentially unlimited supply. Just like Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Etherium, et. al.
"Only so many coins to go around" == "only so much hype to inflate the bubble before it all comes crashing down in hilarity for those smart enough to not get involved"
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You forgot that there are other 5-year-olds that are "forking" your drawings, which creates an essentially unlimited supply
You may be forking the code, but you're not forking the infrastructure it runs on.
Is there an actual practical use for blockchain? (Score:5, Interesting)
As a currency its a complete failure so far.
I was doing some research and some companies are trying to make it work as an inventory tracker.
Every time I see the tech in practice, it seems to be easily replaceable by a secure database, which appears to have all the features of blockchain except the supposed anonymity, and a secure database doesn't have problems like a 51% attack, nor the ridiculous time per transaction or cost per transaction problems.
Seems like blockchain so far is workable as a very expensive type of unregulated gambling.
Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain (Score:5, Informative)
You are precisely correct sir. Blockchain is only useful for publicly distributed ledgers with no central authority. Outside of this scenario, it doesn't make much sense. In your case, you describe a central authority, so yeah, no point.
They have a name for the private ones: banks and exchanges, and they have worked well for a thousand years.
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How about as a mechanism for counting votes? I.e. an electronic voting machine tallies Joe Schmoe's vote and submits that to to the chain. I'm not sure if Joe has a private key or the private key is associated with the machine. The private key needs to be setup so that it cannot be associated with Joe; but with Joe's vote.
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See that idea sounds interesting, it would create a one time record of voting, but that will never fly as for some reason there are people who dont like requiring some kind of proof of ID (or private key) to vote.
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Isn't it amazing how the same people who think "proof of ID" should exist for voting are the same people who will jump to "Papers Please" whenever they hear about any new government program?
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How would you achieve anonymity with that?
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Are you saying that counting a ballot after the election is bad?? Traditionally, ballots were processed after the election except for absentee ballots and other special cases.
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As a currency its a complete failure so far.
I was doing some research and some companies are trying to make it work as an inventory tracker.
Every time I see the tech in practice, it seems to be easily replaceable by a secure database, which appears to have all the features of blockchain except the supposed anonymity, and a secure database doesn't have problems like a 51% attack, nor the ridiculous time per transaction or cost per transaction problems.
Seems like blockchain so far is workable as a very expensive type of unregulated gambling.
There's a lot of places thinking about using the blockchain for land ledgers [qz.com]. The trouble with land ledgers is a lot of people and groups need access but it's really hard to keep track of and keep everything updated, especially in less developed countries. The blockchain solves this by making the information both widely accessible and trustworthy. Best part is land doesn't change hands much so you don't have the scalability issues of bitcoin.
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Is there a version of a blockchain tech that doesn't have the 51% vulnerability? If not imagine having property sold 2 times because someone was able to attain 51% of the public compute rate, or as I understand it the block history can be rewritten as well.
OR were you suggesting a private compute network of some kind, in which case why not use a database?
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What if it's a conglomerate of private networked computers but you can never be 100% you can trust any of them? Someone can hack a database by accessing one computer. Much harder to hack the blockchain since you'd need to hack 51% of the computers almost all at the same time.
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Even if we pretend its impossible for a 51% attack (and I dont believe this, I expect it to happen at some certain thresholds of value where the hardware is cheap enough compared to the perceived value of the coins), attacks could be made on the nodes or consensus or who knows what.
As the perceived value rises, who knows what lengths people or groups will go to attack the network, especially since its supposedly untraceable.
Then I also would find it interesting if all this perceived value is believed, how
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I found it from:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Block... [reddit.com]
"For example in MultiChain, they introduce a permission based mining (not mandatory) and a round-robin style, where a certain miner can mine limited number of blocks. This means different miners will be mining the blocks. Additionally, most private blockchains do not use the concept of "mining" at all - they have KNOWN identities, who will create the block and KNOWN identities, who will confirm that the block is indeed valid."
So you can have known entities on
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Yeah, I assume a private network, or a network comprised of only certain parties (ie levels of government with the authority to modify the ledger).
As to the the advantage over a database, the blockchain is distributed and has a history of transactions for units (and a way to break up units) by design. Just like any tech you can do that stuff with a DB, but it might be more natural to pull off with a blockchain,
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That seems like a particularly silly idea. The registry is only meaningful if there's a strong enough central government. If there is, you might as well just have a secure server. Have two (or ten) independent ones that integrity check each other if you're worried about them being hacked.
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Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain (Score:5, Interesting)
Bitcoin is less than 50 percent of the cryptocurrency market. The problems that are cited with it have been solved in a myriad of ways by various coins.
The volume of those coins is increasing every day, the ecosystem is blooming hard and most people just see Bitcoin and totally miss it.
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It's like people in 1990 who saw AOL and just shrug "Internet is a fad and will die soon".
Re:Is there an actual practical use for blockchain (Score:5, Insightful)
The coin ecosystems currently is reminiscent of the wildcat banking era [wikipedia.org]
Proponents of coins say this is a feature, not a bug.
Bitcoin is singled out because it is the oldest, most established, and if you naively believe that true value of all coins in circulation = spot price * number of coins, also the most valuable.
Sure other coins solve (or alleviate) some of the more glaring problems with bitcoin, yet other significant structural problems remain with the whole concept. One example: sometimes mediation is actually needed to resolve real disputes becasue we are afterall only human and bad actors are out there. The only way, by design, crypto coins do this is forking blockchains, a la The Dao and ETH/ETC split. Again proponents see this is a feature, not a bug.
Alot of wheel reinventing going on, done in ignorance of what has happened in the past WRT banking and finance. IT innovation in banking and finance is wild west stuff and an honest appraisal of things would be that noone knows what the fuck they are doing
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Is there an actual practical use for blockchain?
The use case is basically everything e-gold was used for, before the feds shut that down.
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I know exactly what bitcoin is, a greater fool bubble.
It has been interesting to notice though that every time I see someone say 'you really dont understand bitcoin', or whatever variation of the same, I dont recall ever seeing a description of whatever the person was supposed to be missing or not understanding. Just a blanket 'you dont get it', almost as if there is some kind of true believer faith requirement for bitcoin.
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Currently, the predominant feature of bitcoin is not the tech as such, but the fact that it is the 1 coin you can trade against any other crypto asset on every exchange. In many cases, if you want to buy coin xyz, you have to buy bitcoin first. Likewise, if you sell coin xyz, you have to cash out to bitcoin and then convert to fiat.
As long as that remains the case, bitcoin is more or less guaranteed to have 'a' significant value. But if more and more people start to trade against Ethereum for example, then
I don't get what bitcoin is supposed to do well (Score:3)
Because the blockchain is centralized I don't see how it could ever scale to the levels needed for a regular currency.
And as a store of value, ie digital gold, they're really hard to store and really easy to steal.
I can only see two good functions for bitcoin.
1) The black market, I think this is low volume enough to make bitcoin feasible.
2) If anyone ever solves the scalablility issues bitcoin has a ton of invested parties and will likely integrate the fix. Giving it legitimate value.
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Maybe the OP meant unsharded. Not centralised.
A blockchain ledger in an entirely trustless network needs to be replicated on every participating node. This is a massive scalability issue. Imagine a sizable % of worlds economy running on any given crypto coin for 20+ years. The size of that ledger, the size of updates coming through every second would be staggering.
The traditional banking infrastructure is sharded. The ledger representing my personal bank account is not mixed in with ledgers of customers for
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Because the blockchain is centralized
Blockchain isn't centralized.
Bad phrasing on my part.
It's centralized in the sense that the blockchain is a distributed database. There's a limit to how much throughput the system can handle.
As the followup comment suggested unsharded is a better description of what I meant.
Must be a slow news day (Score:2)
Six percent is just standard volatility for Bitcoin. This is nothing compared to the 20+% drop it had over the course of a few hours a couple of weeks ago. Not to mention that it's already back up to $14k again. This is just someone trying to smear Bitcoin with facts that everyone has already known about it for years, and I say that as someone who recognized Bitcoin as a massive Ponzi scheme a long time ago.
Rob
Every second or third Wednesday (Score:2)
Coin lands on heads for the first time since 2015 (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps my math is wrong, but isn't "first time since 2015" the same as saying "so it's been up and down 50% of the time in the last four years?"
2015: down
2016: up
2017: up
2018: down
But hey, blockchain! cryptocurrency! news!
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Re:1300 pct (Score:5, Funny)
My Zimbabwe currency holdings did better than that in 2007, over 7,000%. increase. wh0h00
Re: 1300 pct (Score:2)
I'm guessing you thought I was serious
I do have one bill as a novelty, I truly can't remember how many zeroes it has. .....lots
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Agreed. Furthermore what goes up must come down and if it went up that fast in one year it will not take it long for it to crash. Problem is BC may crash hard, and if/when it does the rest of the stock market might go with it
And nothing of value will be lost.
Re:1300 pct (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, VW or Exxon collapsing probably would cause a bit of panic. They have the same sort of market cap as bitcoin.
I guess they're different in that they'd pull down a bunch of other companies with them, whereas bitcoin will just take coinbase and a few other similar companies.
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LOL Bull fucking shit. The entire market value of bitcoin even at its peak isn't even more than some of the top company market caps let alone significant enough to impact an entire market.
At one point, total value of bitcoin was coming close to half a trillion USD. Total world GDP is about 80 trillion.
Bitcoin's total value was therefore equal to 1/160th of the world GDP. That's a significant value; but probably not enough to sink the economy for a few reasons:
1) A lot of that value is lost for all time. Lost keys, etc.
2) The number of bitcoin investors is still pretty low. A lot of that wealth is in the hands of a relatively small number of people. Not many people would be significantly
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Agreed. Furthermore what goes up must come down and...
Pioneer 10.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_10
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aka "if you don't know a sucker to take your fall, you're someone else's".
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Put your chart to "all data" it sure starts to look a lot like a dotcom bubble chart!
https://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25
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Heard that for over five years now. My new car and boat bought this year and my remaining Bitcoin is still worth more than it was a year ago.
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His opinion is clearly stated at the end of his post:
If he thought it was all going to crash down he would have sold all of it.
Re: Best Sell Now While You Still Can (Score:5, Funny)
There is no US presidential election in 2018.
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Cryptocurrencies may succeed, but Bitcoin has too many limitations in it that newer cryptocurrencies don't have.
Which ones? There was recently an article about Iota [slashdot.org] but it sounds like it has some serious technical flaws. As to newer blockchain cryptocurriencies, my understanding is they generally improve on bitcoin's technical issues, but they don't actually solve them. If they had one of them would have probably overtaken bitcoin.
I don't see it crashing below January 2017 levels any time soon, but it will be below $5000 by the end of the decade.
The one thing it does have is market dominance and relatively wide acceptance.
I don't think it will crash entirely because a lot of big bitcoin owners don't really need their bitcoin wealth, and so given the choice are unwilling to cash out at current market prices.
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"I don't think it will crash entirely because a lot of big bitcoin owners don't really need their bitcoin wealth, and so given the choice are unwilling to cash out at current market prices."
Someone refusing to sell doesn't determine the price, someone willing to buy (or sell) does. If bitcoin devolves to the point where nobody who's got it is willing to sell, then it's really dead.
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"I don't think it will crash entirely because a lot of big bitcoin owners don't really need their bitcoin wealth, and so given the choice are unwilling to cash out at current market prices."
Someone refusing to sell doesn't determine the price, someone willing to buy (or sell) does. If bitcoin devolves to the point where nobody who's got it is willing to sell, then it's really dead.
Ultimately yes. But the fewer people willing to sell the lower the supply for people who want to buy, and that will keep the price up.
I expect bitcoin to keep yo-yo-ing for a bit, there will be a lot of people getting back in hoping for it to hit $20k again, and they may be right. Since bitcoin is pure speculation there is no proper value, $100 was a bubble, as was $1000, as was $20k. I think the sheer amount of capital is going to limit another big jump, but if common sense didn't halt it previously why sh
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I think you've already had one beer too many.
Dogecoin to the moon!*
* the moon equals one ten dollars.
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3D printing, AI, IoT, gig economy. Millenials!
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pathetic fiat!
Never trust an Italian car! Sure, some may look really fancy, but underneath it all; whether its a crappy Fiat or an expensive Ferrari, its still going to leave you stranded on the side of the road.
Can't understand why people would want fiat currency.
/ yes I know that's not what it means before anyone jumps on me